Dharma of the Living Dead: A Meditation on the Meaning of the Hollywood Zombie
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines the religious implications of the modern zombie, which has achieved great popularity in the modern Western imagination. Today’s zombie-craze can be traced from its roots in Haitian folklore through the 1960s counter-cultural revolution. The popularity of the zombie reflects the after-effects of the anti-authoritarianism of the 1960s. As holes appeared in what Peter Berger called the sacred canopy, previously held systems of meaning collapsed, leaving a growing uncertainty about life and death. In many cases, these holes were filled by alternative spiritualities and Eastern philosophy. I will demonstrate, using Martin Heidegger, how the modern zombie acts as a vessel for Buddhist teachings. As such, the zombie’s popularity can be understood as a reflection of a present need to confront mortality and thus become an ‘‘authentic being.’’
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it